I really do collect vintage photographs.
"I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" - Jack Kerouac, On the Road
My sisters sometimes like to have afternoon tea at 4 after they get home from school. They break out the Famous Amos "biscuits" on small white plates and fill their mugs with hot water and sugar. We don't have any real cream to put in, and we don't ever seem to have any honey. I don't know if my mother likes to find lumps of soggy tea bags and half-eaten chalk cookies all over the table, but I like to think they're at least trying to culture themselves.
Today I went to a bus garage for the first time. It was brilliant to watch those people, though hard to do without laughing. They were too perfectly absurd. Too brilliantly sketched out. I sat there with Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger tucked in my lap - and Jessie did Sudoku while her mother gossiped and made sex jokes with the other drivers.
I liked the tall skinny Frenchman who had a big brass belt buckle, a thick white moustache, and dark aviators. I couldn't write a better character. He talked of the Tropics and sailing around with lots of women on a boat. Those women happened to be me, Jessie, and Jessie's mother... but it was well-played anyway. I wanted to sit in there and watch the people, but we had some errands and I got hungry. We went to Flying Pie after.
Mykl came home today. It was a surprise. It was the best surprise he's ever made up.
I've been wanting to write today. Really write. Not just this half-ass journal business... not stupid short character sketches... not anything like that.
But when I sit down to write it out I can't get it to sound right. Today I'm in a distracted state - everything I write reminds me of something I've already done - or something someone else has already done. Why do we all cliche each other? I spend my whole life chasing after everything and everyone that fascinates me yet I can't seem to ever feel satisfied with my work. I want to get close to it - wrap my arms around it and run my fingers along its face - its lips - to catch the rythm of its step and close in. I want to figure out how to fascinate people and make them crazy like I feel sometimes... and I don't think that's wrong because that's what art is to me. It's that crazy feeling that sends you into a buzz and fizzles out only after you've turned it over with your tongue and let it dissolve all the way. Or it's the flashing glimpse of gold in a sinking wave. Or it's the soft creeping sigh that slips in when you look at the moon through dark tree branches.
Or something gay like that, I guess.
But when I try to do it I feel like I'm one of five hundred monkeys at those typewriters who type for a million years only to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare.
Everyone can tell, can't they? Nothing's new anymore. Nothing's clever enough.
I went to the bookstore today and sat down on the ground reading first pages. That's what I do when I can't decide which book to pick. I can't seem to decide standing up... and usually I can tell by the first page which one will fit my mood the best. I was trying to pick one to get Mykl for his birthday - Jessie was there, too.
I popped open Dubliners, that set of Irish short stories by James Joyce. I read the first page and wanted to cry. Sometimes I get so frustrated. I'm no writer. I want to write something people will 'get' and study or just feel through the first time. But I'm no James Joyce. I'm no J.D. Salinger. I'm no Kurt Vonnegut, no Jack Kerouac, no Virginia Woolf.
But I write anyway. I'm not those people, I'm me. Maybe if I keep spilling out all these bits and scraps of what ingenuity I do possess... my name will stick up for itself someday.
The past few months I've listened to a band called "Hot Hot Heat." They're from Vancouver, BC. They cut their first record in a converted barn up in Victoria, my England away from Europe. I like the lead singer's voice more than I meant to. I don't know if my friends would like them - I mean, these guys are on the radio... I guess we're too posh or artsy for that or something. But I think they are good at telling stories. I like one song called "Jingle Jangle" because it reminds me of that play we read my junior year - the Death of a Salesman. I loved that book because it was sad. I loved it because I know what it's like to have big plans and then mess them all up. I loved it because I felt like I'd been seeing myself doing grand things with grand people all my life but I'm still not really doing anything but keeping my writing to myself and going to school in tumbleweed, Utah. I loved it because it made me think about what I care about... and it made me think that maybe I care about the wrong things a lot of the time.
Maybe that's why I want to write.
I also have a lot of drawing I want to sit down and do. I have a lot of drawings I want to finish up for Colby. I just want some time where I can sit in a room and listen to those songs over and over again without distractions.
Sometimes I want to live somewhere where I don't have to come when anyone calls - maybe even somewhere where no one even calls at all. A place where I don't have to come out of my room all day if I'm feeling that way. Maybe that's why I get sick so often - so I have the excuse to write and draw for hours and hours at a time with no one nagging me about being 'unproductive.' I have to get mono to get any real work done.
I know that's just what my parents want me to do.
I'll move into an apartment somewhere in gang-rape, New York where I can lock myself away and never pay the phone bills so no one knows if I'm even alive. Then I'll go on a vegetarian stint and spend every afternoon sitting at the same park bench in Central Park for six months working on just the very first line of a novel I never finish. I'll go to the Metropolitain Museum on weekends and wonder if I should become a sculptor. I'll collect vintage photos of happy domestic couples as an ironic statement on my life and hang them up around the apartment on clotheslines. I'll have a tragic love affair with a chef named Mark from Montreal who has a French accent and a taste for chili mixed with fritos. I'll be ok with it as long as he gets the meatless chili, because I'm still a vegetarian. He'll change his name from 'Mark' to 'Marc' and go through a vertical stripe button-down-shirt phase. We'll have nothing to talk about except the sound of the sink leaking and how it symbolizes the slow morbid decay of human emotion in the modern world. I'll die of alcohol poisoning late one rainy night while Marc is in the restaurant bathroom fooling around with that skinny waitress with the tattoo of a bunch of red grapes running down the back of her neck. Her name will be Veronica and she'll quit her job after learning that Marc isn't really French.
Then later when they're going through my stuff they'll find stacks and stacks of unfinished drafts in red shoeboxes behind the ironing board in the closet. The drafts will be sad and brilliant and say absolutely nothing at all. They'll publish them. Everyone will buy them. My French-sounding boyfriend will become an icon everyone loves to hate like Yoko Ono or Courtney Love. He'll make appearances on talk shows and later auction off my collection of vintage photographs to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. Then the art critics will all talk about how all of my stories symbolize the slow morbid decay of human emotion in the modern world.
I can't even take my own future seriously.
I should be a writer, after all.